This invention relates to scholastic test grading apparatus, and especially to apparatus for quickly and easily evaluating answers to different scholastic examination units without adjustment of the machine answer code.
Automatic test grading machines have recently become popular for grading many types of student examinations. These are especially useful in scoring examinations wherein multiple-choice or true/false answers are indicated upon standardized answer sheets. Prior grading machines comprise fairly complicated and expensive electrical and mechanical apparatus which compare student responses with an answer code and provide a performance readout such as a number indicating how many questions were correctly answered.
In modern education, students are frequently encouraged to proceed through sequential courses of study at an individually-set pace, and to test themselves on each subject unit as soon as they feel they have mastered the material of that unit. In such practice, it is desirable to provide test and grading apparatus which will accommodate many students completing different examinations simultaneously, and to provide inexpensive and easy to operate grading apparatus which will score different examinations with little or no machine adjustment from one examination to another.
In the prior art, U.S. Pat. No. 3,407,516 proposes a test grading system which utilizes answer cards on which the student indicates his responses to test questions by punching holes at selected locations. The punched answer card is then graded by superimposing it on a test code card which has perforations therein arranged according to the correct responses to the test questions, and both cards are inserted into a machine for scoring. In the machine, a series of contact fingers sense matching holes and register one count whenever the perforations in the two cards coincide. Such machines do not indicate to the student which questions were answered correctly and which were not, and this is especially disadvantageous for grading self-administered, progress tests used in sequential study courses. Moreover, the machine requires a separate answer code card for each different examination, and one of these cards must be inserted into the machine each time an answer card is inserted, which makes a machine of this type both complicated and time consuming to use.
Other grading machines have been proposed which provide a plurality of self-contained answer codes. These machines may use a standardized answer card on which the student indicates his responses to test questions by blacking-in selected ones of a series of blocks with pencil lead. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,631,611, for example, such an answer card is graded by bringing it into contact with a series of spaced contact fingers which are electrically connected according to a preset answer code. Each correctly located answer marking on the card completes a circuit through a pair of the fingers to energize a counter for registering the total number of correct answers, and to energize a marking device which marks the correct answers. While machines of this type do not require answer codes to be maintained apart from the machine itself, they do require the machine to be provided with marking means and means to change the answer code, and require changing the answer code whenever a card from a different examination is to be graded. Such provisions make the machine complicated and expensive, and its use is particularly time consuming and undesirable when students are following modern, individualized programs of study and are thus completing many different examinations at the same time.
The present invention provides an inexpensive grading apparatus which is easy to use, which tells the student not only how many but which answers are correct and incorrect, and which permits different tests to be scored in different ways without machine adjustment.